Books: An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
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William Dean Howells >> An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
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I thought that this was very likely, too, but I would not admit it.
The dress came home at nine o'clock, and operated a happy diversion
from my imaginable shortcomings; for it appeared from Mrs. March's
asides to me that it was a perfect horror in the set, and that
everybody could see that it had been simply SLUNG together at the
last moment, and she would never, as long as the world stood, go to
that woman for anything again.
I must say I could not myself see anything wrong about the dress. I
thought it exquisite in tint and texture; a delicate, pale-greenish
film that clung and floated, and set off the girl's beauty as the
leafage of a flower heightens the loveliness of a flower. I did not
dare to say this in the face of Mrs. March's private despair, and I
was silent while the girl submitted to be twirled about for my
inspection like a statue on a revolving pedestal. Kendricks,
however, had no such restrictions upon him, and I could see him
start with delight in the splendid vision before he spoke.
"ISN'T it a poem?" demanded Mrs. March. "Isn't it a perfect LYRIC?"
"Why should you have allowed her to be transported altogether into
the ideal? Wasn't she far enough from us before?" he asked; and I
found myself wishing that he would be either less or more
articulate. He ought to have been mute with passion, or else he
ought to have been frankly voluble about the girl's gown, and gone
on about it longer. But he simply left the matter there, and though
I kept him carefully under my eye, I could not see that he was
concealing any further emotion. She, on her part, neither blushed
nor frowned at his compliment; she did nothing by look or gesture to
provoke more praise; she took it very much as the beautiful evening
might, so undeniably fine, so perfect in its way.
She and the evening were equally fitted for the event to which they
seemed equally dedicated. The dancing was to be out of doors on a
vast planking, or platform, set up in the heart of that bosky court
which the hotel incloses. Around this platform drooped the slim,
tall Saratogan trees, and over it hung the Saratogan sky, of a
nocturnal blue very rare in our latitude, with the stars faint in
its depths, and by and by a white moon that permitted itself a
modest competition with the electric lights effulgent everywhere.
There was a great crowd of people in the portico, the vestibule, and
the inner piazzas, and on the lawn around the platform, where "the
trodden weed" sent up the sweet scent of bruised grass in the cool
night air. My foolish old heart bounded with a pulse of youth at
the thought of all the gay and tender possibilities of such a scene.
But the young people under my care seemed in no haste to mingle in
it. We oldsters are always fancying youth impatient, but there is
no time of life which has so much patience. It behaves as if it had
eternity before it--an eternity of youth--instead of a few days and
years, and then the frosty poll. We who are young no longer think
we would do so and so if we were young, as women think they would do
so and so if they were men; but if we were really young again, we
should not do at all what we think. We should not hurry to
experience our emotions; we should not press forward to discharge
our duties or repair our mistakes; we should not seize the occasion
to make a friend or reconcile an enemy; we should let weeks and
months go by in the realisation of a passion, and trust all sorts of
contingencies and accidents to help us out with its confession. The
thoughts of youth are very long, and its conclusions are deliberate
and delayed, and often withheld altogether. It is age which is
tremulously eager in these matters, and cannot wait with the fine
patience of nature in her growing moods.
As soon, even, as I was in the hotel I was impatient to press
through to the place where the dancing was, and where I already
heard the band playing. I knew very well that when we got there I
should have to sit down somewhere on the edge of the platform with
the other frumps and fogies, and begin taking cold in my dress-coat,
and want to doze off without being able to, while my young people
were waltzing together, or else promenading up and down ignoring me,
or recognising me by the offer of a fan, and the question whether I
was not simply melting; I have seen how the poor chaperon fares at
such times. But they, secure of their fun, were by no means
desirous to have it over, or even to have it begin. They dawdled
through the thronged hotel office, where other irresponsible pairs
were coming and going under the admiring eyes of the hotel loungers,
and they wandered up and down the waste parlours, and sat on tete-a-
tetes just to try them, apparently; and Miss Gage verified in the
mirrors the beauty which was reflected in all eyes. They amused
themselves with the extent of the richly-carpeted and upholstered
desolation around them, where only a few lonely and aging women
lurked about on sofas and ottomans; and they fell to playing with
their compassion for the plebeian spectators at the long verandah
windows trying to penetrate with their forbidden eyes to the hop
going on in the court far beyond the intermediary desert of the
parlours.
When they signified at last that they were ready for me to lead them
on to the dance, I would so much rather have gone to bed that there
are no words for the comparison. Then, when we got to the place,
which I should never have been able to reach in the world if it had
not been for the young energy and inspiration of Kendricks, and they
had put me in a certain seat with Miss Gage's wraps beside me where
they could find me, they went off and danced for hours and hours.
For hours and hours? For ages and ages! while I withered away amid
mouldering mothers, and saw my charges through the dreadful half-
dreams of such a state whirling in the waltz, hopping in the polka,
sliding in the galop, and then endlessly walking up and down between
the dances, and eating and drinking the chill refreshments that it
made my teeth chatter to think of. I suppose they decently came to
me from time to time, though they seemed to be always dancing, for I
could afterward remember Miss Gage taking a wrap from me now and
then, and quickly coming back to shed it upon my lap again. I got
so chilled that if they had not been unmistakably women's wraps I
should have bundled them all about my shoulders, which I could
almost hear creak with rheumatism. I must have fallen into a sort
of drowse at last; for I was having a dispute with some sort of
authority, which turned out to be Mrs. March, and upbraiding her
with the fact that there were no women's wraps which would also do
for a man, when the young people stood arm in arm before me, and
Miss Gage said that she was tired to death now, and they were going.
But it appeared that they were only going as far as the parlours for
the present; for when they re-entered the hotel, they turned into
them, and sat down there quite as if that had been the
understanding. When I arrived with the wraps, I was reminded of
something, and I said, "Have you two been dancing together the whole
evening?"
They looked at each other as if for the first time they now realised
the fact, and Kendricks said, "Why, of course we have! We didn't
know anybody."
"Very well, then," I said; "you have got me into a scrape."
"Oh, poor Mr. March!" cried the girl. "How have we done it?"
"Why, Mrs. March said that Mr. Kendricks would be sure to know
numbers of people, and I must get you other partners, for it
wouldn't do for you to dance the whole evening together."
She threw herself back in the chair she had taken, and laughed as if
this were the best joke in the world.
He said hardily, "You see it HAS done."
"And if it wouldn't do," she gasped, "why didn't you bring me the
other partners?"
"Because I didn't know any," I said; and this seemed to amuse them
both so much that I was afraid they would never get their breath.
She looked by and by at her dancing-card, and as soon as she could
wipe the tears from her eyes she said, "No; there is no other name
there"; and this seemed even a better joke than the other from the
way they joined in laughing at it.
"Well, now," I said, when they were quiet again, "this won't do, my
young friends. It's all very well for you, and you seem to like it;
but I am responsible for your having passed a proper evening under
my chaperonage, and something has got to be done to prove it." They
saw the reasonableness of this, and they immediately became sober.
"Kendricks," I asked, "can't you think of something?"
No, he said, he couldn't; and then he began to laugh again.
I applied to her in the same terms; but she only answered, "Oh,
don't ask ME," and she went off laughing too.
"Very well, then," I said; "I shall have to do something desperate,
and I shall expect you both to bear me out in it, and I don't want
any miserable subterfuges when it comes to the point with Mrs.
March. Will you let me have your dancing-card Miss Gage?" She
detached it, and handed it to me. "It's very fortunate that Mr.
Kendricks wrote his name for the first dance only, and didn't go on
and fill it up."
"Why, we didn't think it was worth while!" she innocently explained.
"And that's what makes it so perfectly providential, as Mrs. March
says. Now then," I went on, as I wrote in the name of a rising
young politician, who happened just then to have been announced as
arriving in Saratoga to join some other leaders in arranging the
slate of his party for the convention to meet a month later, "we
will begin with a good American."
I handed the card to Kendricks. "Do you happen to remember the name
of the young French nobleman who danced the third dance with Miss
Gage?"
"No," he said; "but I think I could invent it." And he dashed down
an extremely probable marquis, while Miss Gage clapped her hands for
joy.
"Oh, how glorious! how splendid!"
I asked, "Will you ever give me away the longest day you live?"
"Never," she promised; and I added the name of a South American
doctor, one of those doctors who seem to be always becoming the
presidents of their republics, and ordering all their patients of
opposite politics to be shot in the plaza.
Kendricks entered a younger son of an English duke, and I
contributed the hyphenated surname of a New York swell, and between
us we soon had all the dances on Miss Gage's card taken by the most
distinguished people. We really studied probability in the forgery,
and we were proud of the air of reality it wore in the carefully
differenced handwritings, with national traits nicely accented in
each.
CHAPTER XVI
The fun of it all was that Mrs. March was not deceived for an
instant. "Oh, nonsense!" she said, when she glanced at our pretty
deception, which we presented with perhaps too perfect seriousness.
"Then you danced only the first dance?"
"No, no!" Miss Gage protested. "I danced every dance as long as I
stayed." She laughed with her handkerchief to her mouth and her
eyes shining above.
"Yes; I can testify to that, Mrs. March," said Kendricks, and he
laughed wildly, too. I must say their laughter throughout was far
beyond the mirthfulness of the facts. They both protested that they
had had the best time in the world, and the gayest time; that I had
been a mirror of chaperons, and followed them round with my eyes
wherever they went like a family portrait; and that they were the
most exemplary young couple at the hop in their behaviour. Mrs.
March asked them all about it, and she joined in their fun with a
hilarity which I knew from long experience boded me no good.
When Kendricks had gone away, and Miss Gage had left us for the
night with an embrace, whose fondness I wondered at, from Mrs.
March, an awful silence fell upon us in the deserted parlour where
she had waited up.
I knew that when she broke the silence she would begin with, "Well,
my dear!" and this was what she did. She added, "I hope you're
convinced NOW!"
I did not even pretend not to understand. "You mean that they are
in love? I suppose that their we-ing and us-ing so much would
indicate something of the kind."
"It isn't that alone; everything indicates it. She would hardly let
go of him with her eyes. I wish," sighed Mrs. March, and she let
her head droop upon her hand a moment, "I could be as sure of him as
I am of her."
''Wouldn't that double the difficulty?" I ventured to suggest,
though till she spoke I had not doubted that it was the case.
"I should make you speak to him if I were sure of him; but as it is
I shall speak to her, and the sooner the better."
"To-night?" I quaked.
"No; I shall let the poor thing have her sleep to-night. But the
first thing in the morning I shall speak, and I want you to send her
up to me as soon as she's had her breakfast. Tell her I'm not well,
and shall not be down; I shall not close my eyes the whole night.
And now," she added, "I want you to tell me everything that happened
this evening. Don't omit a word, or a look, or a motion. I wish to
proceed intelligently."
I hope I was accurate in the history of the hop which I gave Mrs.
March; I am sure I was full. I think my account may be justly
described as having a creative truthfulness, if no other merit. I
had really no wish to conceal anything except the fact that I had
not, in my utter helplessness, even tried to get Miss Gage any other
partners. But in the larger interest of the present situation, Mrs.
March seemed to have lost the sense of my dereliction in this
respect. She merely asked, "And it was after you went back to the
parlour, just before you came home, that you wrote those names on
her card?"
"Kendricks wrote half of them," I said.
"I dare say. Well, it was very amusing, and if the circumstances
were different, I could have entered into the spirit of it too. But
you see yourself, Basil, that we can't let this affair go any
further without dealing frankly with her. YOU can't speak to her,
and _I_ MUST. Don't you see?"
I said that I saw, but I had suddenly a wild wish that it were
practicable for me to speak to Miss Gage. I should have liked to
have a peep into a girl's heart at just such a moment, when it must
be quivering with the unconfessed sense of love, and the confident
hope of being loved, but while as yet nothing was assured, nothing
was ascertained. If it would not have been shocking, if it would
not have been sacrilegious, it would have been infinitely
interesting, and from an aesthetic point of view infinitely
important. I thought that I should have been willing to undergo all
the embarrassment of such an inquiry for the sake of its precious
results, if it had been at all possible; but I acquiesced that it
would not be possible. I felt that I was getting off pretty lightly
not to have it brought home to me again that I was the cause of all
this trouble, and that if it had not been for me there would have
been, as far as Mrs. March was concerned, no Miss Gage, and no love-
affair of hers to deal with. I debated in my mind a moment whether
I had better urge her to let me speak to Kendricks after all; but I
forbore, and in the morning I waited about in much perturbation,
after I had sent Miss Gage to her, until I could know the result of
their interview. When I saw the girl come away from her room, which
she did rather trippingly, I went to her, and found her by no means
the wreck I had expected the ordeal to leave her.
"Did you meet Miss Gage?" she asked.
"Yes," I returned, with tremulous expectation.
"Well, don't you think she looks perfectly divine in that gown?
It's one of Mme. Cody's, and we got it for thirty dollars. It would
have been fifty in New York, and it was, here, earlier in the
season. I shall always come here for some of my things; as soon as
the season's a little past they simply FLING them away. Well, my
dear!"
"Well, what?"
"I didn't speak to her after all."
"You didn't! Don't you think she's in love with him, then?"
"Dead."
"Well?"
"Well, I couldn't somehow seem to approach the subject as I had
expected to. She was so happy, and so good, and so perfectly
obedient, that I couldn't get anything to take hold of. You see, I
didn't know but she might be a little rebellious, or resentful of my
interference; but in the little gingerly attempts I did make she was
so submissive, don't you understand? And she was very modest about
Mr. Kendricks' attentions, and so self-depreciatory that, well--"
"Look here, Isabel," I broke in, "this is pretty shameless of you.
You pretend to be in the greatest kind of fidge about this girl; and
you make me lie awake all night thinking what you're going to say to
her; and now you as much as tell me you were so fascinated with the
modest way she was in love that you couldn't say anything to her
against being in love on our hands in any sort of way. Do you call
this business?"
"Well, I don't care if I DID encourage her--"
"Oh, you even encouraged her!"
"I DIDN'T encourage her. I merely praised Mr. Kendricks, and said
how much you thought of him as a writer."
"Oh! then you gave the subject a literary cast. I see! Do you
think Miss Gage was able to follow you?"
"That doesn't matter."
"And what do you propose to do now?"
"I propose to do nothing. I think that I have done all my duty
requires, and that now I can leave the whole affair to you. It was
your affair in the beginning. I don't see why I should worry myself
about it."
"It seems to me that this is a very strange position for a lady to
take who was not going to close an eye last night in view of a
situation which has not changed in the least, except for the worse.
Don't you think you are rather culpably light-hearted all of a
sudden?"
"I am light-hearted, but if there is any culpability it is yours,
Basil."
I reflected, but I failed to find any novelty in the fact. "Very
well, then; what do you propose that I should do?"
"I leave that entirely to your own conscience."
"And if my conscience has no suggestion to make?"
"That's your affair."
I reflected again, and then I said, more than anything to make her
uncomfortable, I'm afraid: "I feel perfectly easy in my conscience,
personally, but I have a social duty in the matter, and I hope I
shall perform it with more fidelity and courage than you have shown.
I shall speak to Kendricks."
She said: "That is just what you ought to do. I'm quite
surprised." After this touch of irony she added earnestly, "And I
do hope, my dear, you will use judgment in speaking to him, and
tact. You mustn't go at it bluntly. Remember that Mr. Kendricks is
not at all to blame. He began to show her attention to oblige us,
and if she has fallen in love with him it is our fault."
"I shall handle him without gloves," I said. "I shall tell him he
had better go away."
I was joking, but she said seriously, "Yes; he must go away. And I
don't envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, of
course."
"Well, then, you must advise me," I said; and we really began to
consider the question. We could hardly exaggerate the difficulty
and delicacy of the duty before me. We recognised that before I
made any explicit demand of him I must first ascertain the nature of
the whole ground and then be governed by the facts. It would be
simple enough if I had merely to say that we thought the girl's
affections were becoming engaged, and then appeal to his eager
generosity, his delicate magnanimity; but there were possible
complications on his side which must be regarded. I was to
ascertain, we concluded, the exact nature of the situation before I
ventured to say anything openly. I was to make my approaches by a
series of ambushes before I unmasked my purpose, and perhaps I must
not unmask it at all. As I set off on my mission, which must begin
with finding Kendricks at his hotel, Mrs. March said she pitied me.
She called me back to ask whether I thought I had really better do
anything. Then, as I showed signs of weakening, she drove me from
her with, "Yes, yes! You must! You must!"
CHAPTER XVII
It was still so early that I had my doubts whether I should find
Kendricks up after the last night's revelry, but he met me half-way
between our hotel and his. He said he was coming to see how Mrs.
March was bearing Miss Gage's immense success at the ball; but
perhaps this was not his sole motive. He asked frankly how the
young lady was, and whether I thought Mrs. March would consider a
lunch at a restaurant by the lake a good notion. When I said I had
very little doubt she would, and proposed taking a turn in the park
before I went back with him, he looked at his watch and laughed, and
said he supposed it WAS rather early yet, and came very willingly
with me.
We had the pretty place almost to ourselves at that hour. There
were a half-dozen or so nursemaids, pushing their perambulators
about, or standing the vehicles across the walk in front of the
benches where they sat, in the simple belief of all people who have
to do with babies that the rest of the world may be fitly
discommoded in their behalf. But they did not actively molest us,
and they scarcely circumscribed our choice of seats. We were by no
means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for them, and I should
rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt were the
associations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have been
more natural than that I should say, as we sat down there, "This was
where I first saw Miss Gage with her friends"; and it was by a
perfectly natural transition that I should go on to speak, in a
semi-humorous strain, of the responsibility which Mrs. March and
myself had incurred by letting our sympathy for her run away with
us. I said I supposed that if we had not been willing from the
first to try to realise for her some of the expectations we imagined
she had in coming to Saratoga, she never would have fallen to our
charge; that people really brought a great many more things upon
themselves than they were willing to own; and that fate was perhaps
more the fulfilment of our tacit ambitions than our overt acts.
This bit of philosophy, which I confess I thought fine, did not seem
to impress Kendricks. He merely said that it must be great fun to
have the chance of baffling the malice of circumstance in a case
like that, and I perceived that he felt nothing complex in the
situation. In fact, I doubt whether youth perceives anything
complex in life. To the young, life is a very plain case. To be
sure, they are much more alarmed than their elders at getting
tangled up in its web at times, but that is because they have not
had our experience in getting untangled, and think they are never
going to get out alive. When they do, they think that it is the
only tangle they are ever going to be in, and do not know that they
are simply going on from one to another as long as there is enough
of them left to be caught in a mesh. To Kendricks we Marches were
simply two amiable people, who had fancied doing a pleasant thing
for a beautiful girl that accident had thrown it in our power to
befriend, and were by no means the trembling arbiters of her destiny
we felt ourselves to be. The difference between his objective sense
and my subjective sense was the difference between his twenty-seven
years and my fifty-two, and while this remained I saw that it would
be useless to try to get on common ground with him, or to give him
our point of view. If I were to speak to him at all, it must be
with authority, with the right of one who stood in the place of the
girl's parents, and had her happiness at heart. That is, it was
something like that; but my words say it too bluntly. I found
myself beginning, "I have rather had a notion that her father might
come on, and take the enterprise off our hands," though, to tell the
truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at
that moment through an association with the thought of parents.
"Have you any idea what sort of man he is?" asked Kendricks.
"Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and
president of the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the
place, but probably as ignorant of our world as a Cherokee."
"Well, I don't know," said the young fellow. "Do you think that
follows because he doesn't live in it?" I could see that he did not
quite like what I had said. "I suppose ours is rather a small
world."
"The smallest of all worlds," I answered. "And in the eyes of Papa
Gage, if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel
to an atom."
"Do you think," he asked, with a manifest anxiety, "that it would in
hers?"
"No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy
him. I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as
Fulkerson would call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa
Gage is a shrewd, practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye
single to the main chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to
the backbone, blindly devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of
all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn't understand.
I don't know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally
long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His
natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed
farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a
livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and
get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point
National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed solidity, imposed
himself upon the free and independent voters of the village--a
majority of them under mortgage to him--and became its president.
It isn't a pleasant type, but it's ideally American."
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